The hundred-page summary of the National Transport Strategy (NTS), to be discussed by the Government in the near future, is based on analyses and preliminary studies of over 5 thousand pages, Minister of National Development Zsuzsa Németh said at the 15th Conference on Transport Development and Investment of the Association for Transport Sciences in Bükfürdő on 18 March, 2014.

In the course of working out the document, a comprehensive traffic model based on an all-embracing transport concept and examining the interactions of the individual subfields was drawn up, unexampled  not only in Hungary but in the whole Central-East European region. 

The National Transport Strategy is to determine Hungary’s future strategy based on the transport concept, facilitating the strategic nature of the development of the transport system with a short-term (2020) and a long-term (2030) perspective and as well as a wide vision (up to 2050). The important practical reason necessitating working out the NTS was that the availability of the strategy is one of the basic conditions for Brussels’ approval of the Integrated Transport Development Operational Programme (ITOP) for the 2014-2020 planning period, to be finalised soon.

As part of the 3-year preparatory process, social and professional consultations for the strategy were completed in December 2013, with numerous social and civil organisations, acknowledged transport experts and representatives of the regions (chairpersons of county assemblies, municipal officials) involved. The number of useful comments received and processed was more than 1,700.

The primary goal of NTS is to ensure that, by efficiently serving economic processes, the transport system should facilitate increasing competitiveness to the extent possible. Its tasks include ensuring the conditions for sustainable growth; coordinate the sometimes conflicting environmental and economic, national and EU objectives and exploiting Hungary’s role as a transport hub by considering societal demands.

Approaching from the direction of public road development of NTS, the Minister emphasised the need to establish connections joining county seats to the network, construct international transit corridors up to the borders and continue trunk road reconstruction programmes and the construction of ring roads. In the field of railways, the strategy identifies the continuation of ongoing transit corridor developments, the gradual elimination of slow zones and the development of suburban lines as the primary tasks.

The electronic road toll collection system successfully launched last year, collecting tolls in proportion to the length of the road sections used, is a decisive new source of revenues, the Minister pointed out. The government’s subsidisation policy is to focus on economic development in the years to come. If economic performance improves according to expectations, the development and refurbishment of transport infrastructure can also be set on a sustainable course as a result of increased state revenues, Zsuzsa Németh added.

(Ministry of National Development)